Friday, June 01, 2012

State Capitalism

As a child of Thatcher I know I need no philosophy or morality. All I need is to set up  a free market and that will decide on the optimal course of action. The Labour party used to believe in things such as nationalization, however for many years

I downloaded a short book called "State Capitalism" that is part of the Penguin short collection. This was an interesting book. A lot of the countries that have economic growth, such as China and Singapore actually have many industries owned by the state. Although the author claimed that things could be better organized in the private sector, but the grow achieved by state capitalism is still impressive. The countries in the developing world have already seen the effect of austerity. For example Russia tried extreme free market reform when communism ended. The results was an economic disaster. Somehow politicians in the developing world have learned from these experiences, bot our western politicians are still pushing the free market ideology, as Europe and the US slowly sink.